When 'academic freedom' fails

Joseph Farah is founder, editor and CEO of WND and a nationally syndicated columnist with Creators News Service.. He is the author or co-author of 13 books, including his latest, "The Tea Party Manifesto," and his classic, "Taking America Back," now in its third edition and 14th printing. Farah is the former editor of the legendary Sacramento Union and other major-market dailies.

After the University of Colorado’s Ward Churchill scandal, you might think it’s nearly impossible for U.S. universities to get rid of faculty members.

It’s not so.

While it’s true that faculty members can embrace terrorists, demean their victims, plagiarize the work of others, lie about their ethnic backgrounds for better positions and generally hold America and Americans in contempt, there is something they can say on the college campus that will get them fired.

In fact, I can tell you very easily and succinctly what a college professor can do to get the ax on nearly any university campus across this country.

All he or she has to do is tell the truth about what is happening in the Middle East.

That’s what Professor Thomas Klocek of DePaul University in Chicago found out the hard way.

Last Sept. 15, the man who has taught critical thinking, college writing and cultures of the world at the Catholic university’s School for New Learning for the last 15 years, Klocek made the mistake of debating the subject of the Middle East with some extremists partial to Hamas, the Islamic Jihad and Arab nationalists among the Students for Justice in Palestine and the United Muslims Moving Ahead at a student activities fair.

The informal debate got heated, as Klocek was the sole defender of Israel and Middle East Christians in the room. But there were no blows exchanged. There were no verbal threats. And the spirited argument lasted between 15 and 20 minutes, according to everyone involved.

Nine days later, Klocek found himself the victim of an “emergency suspension” and unceremoniously kicked off the campus. No hearing by his peers. No formal complaints lodged against him. The unsubstantiated accusations by zealous students that Klocek made “racist” remarks was all that was needed to crush the claim of academic freedom at DePaul.

He was offered his job back if he agreed to monitored teaching and apologized to the students. He refused.

Now he finds himself with no job. That’s how easy it is to lose one’s job in academia if you ruffle the feathers of the jihadi groupies who overpopulate virtually every campus in North America.

But the 58-year-old Klocek is not going quietly.

Any day now, his attorney John W. Mauck tells me, he will be filing a lawsuit against DePaul charging improper dismissal and exposing the sham of “diversity” and “tolerance” at the campus.

You see, diversity is welcomed in academia as long as you don’t disagree with what passes for conventional wisdom in the rarefied atmosphere of academia.

Tolerance is the watchword, but tolerance is a one-way street for the pseudo-intellectual thugs on most campuses.

Klocek was accused by the students of the unpardonable sins of “demeaning their ideas” and “dishonoring their perspective” and pressing erroneous assertions” and that he used his power as a “professor over them” to force them to accept his arguments as true.

What did he say? He questioned the accuracy of literature asserting Rachel Corrie was “murdered by an Israeli bulldozer” and a verbal assertion that “the Palestinians are being treated by Israelis the same way Hitler treated the Jews.”

In other words, he was intellectually honest and told the truth.

That is a high crime on many major college campuses today.

Students can be badgered and bullied and even flunked for disagreeing with nonsense espoused in classrooms all over America. But watch out if one “politically incorrect” professor dares to disagree with the apologists for suicide bombers at a student activities fair.

If Professor Klocek needs an expert witness to defend his arguments, this Arab-American journalist – who specializes in Mideast reporting, and who taught briefly at the University of California Los Angeles and who has lectured at North American universities and elsewhere on the subject – is prepared to defend the validity of his arguments in the courtroom.